The End of Everything: A Novel

David Bergelson

Oct 2013 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

In this powerful novel set in Tsarist Russia, a young Jewish woman forced into a marriage of convenience descends into emotional turmoil.

Originally published in 1913, and titled When All Is Said and Done in previous translations, The End of Everything is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Considered David Bergelson’s masterpiece, it was written in Yiddish and until now has been unavailable in a complete and accurate English translation. This version by acclaimed translator Joseph Sherman finally brings the novel to a wide English-speaking audience.
Bergelson depicts the lives of upwardly mobile, self-aware nouveaux riche Jews in the waning years of the Russian Empire. The central character, Mirel Hurvits, is an educated, beautiful woman who embodies the conflict between tradition and progress, aristocracy and enterprise. A forced marriage of convenience results in Mirel’s emotional disintegration and provokes a confrontation with the expectations of her pious family and with Jewish tradition. In a unique prose style of unsurpassable range and beauty, Bergelson reduces language to its bare essentials, punctuated by silences that heighten the sense of alienation in the story.

About the author

A Russian Yiddish novelist and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, David Bergelson (1884–1952) was one of the thirteen defendants at the infamous trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee held in Moscow in May 1952. He was not shot with the other defendants because he suffered a nervous collapse in prison, where he died in January 1953. Many scholars believe that Bergelson is the most significant modernist writer in Yiddish prose fiction, including I. B. Singer, but his works have not been well or widely translated and he is little known outside of scholarly circles. Bergelson focused on the upwardly mobile, self-aware, nouveaux riche Jews from Russia’s great metropolises. He is a modernist writer whose skepticism and distress about culture and society underlay a quest for Jewish identity in a collapsing world. The translator, Joseph Sherman, has been the Corob Fellow in Yiddish Studies at Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature (Oxford, 2003) and translator of Isaac Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1987).